Blade Runner 2017

Just watched Blade Runner (2017) it being forty years and a generation on from Ridley Scott’s original (1982); a great opportunity to observe our cultural changes. Be prepared; it’s not good. The original was a complex, hazy, an amazing visually articulate story that shared its search for a meaning with its audience. It was daring, bold and confident. The second Blade Runner is none of these; it’s a pleaser. The story was un-discernable, the dialogue mumbled and the acting inert, until Harrison Ford appeared, a human being shining amongst a cast of replicants. That’s why I’m writing this. Forty years on and the replicants are making the film to please a replicant public. We don’t have a discernable story, we aren’t daring or confident, we exist amongst mumbled facts and none facts until all about us is a sea of fiction. Our only much reduced imperative is to personally choose what we wish to believe. Our future is not a competition with a corporate biomechanical replicant manufacturer but an all pervasive insitu cognitive conversion into its equivalent. The allegory that was the first has become the reality of the second give or take beautiful destruction and overly loud background noise. “These aren’t your memories, they’re implants, they were created by a New York advertising exec, chosen for you by a Face Book algorithm.” And now in 2022, “You have shone so very brightly, but a candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long,” and it’s all catching up with us. But luckily Blade Runner (2017) hasn’t pleased, it being on TV three years after its launch. Maybe it was just ill made, or maybe it’s a reflection so true we hardy see it. The credits lasted minutes listing thousands; it was obviously perfectly made. But then you wouldn’t expect anything less from a replicant.